Got the new flux and filler today. Cleaned up a piece of scrap real nice, quickly prepped a rough miter, applied flux in a comparable amount to what i'd been doing before, swapped to a smaller tip size and went to it. It worked nicer than before and the result was soooo much cleaner. I know i changed several variables at once, but i'm not conducting a precision experiment, i just wanted to try different things. I'll go back and try different combinations of things, but for now i'm just glad to see the difference.

I think the smaller tip was too small, it wasn't really heating the tube very well. I had to take a lot of time and get right in there with the inner-cone. to finally get things warm. Probably something between that and how hot i was getting before will be good.

The flux definitely made a difference in the amount of crud that was left when i was done. When finished you could clearly see where it had been applied and where it had not... clean vs black and sooty. So i'll use a little more coverage in the future to reduce cleanup.



Also, i used the tip cleaners i bought the other day to try to determine the size of my torch tips. With the one i had been using before, a Smith V24, the largest size tip cleaner i could get in there was said to be for a 65-67 equivalent size drill hole, which according the the chart Live Wire posted would put it in the neighborhood of a modern Smith AW203 or Victor #0.

Unfortunately, when i started looking closely at the tips i've got, and checking them with the tip cleaners, i noticed that over the decades, they appear to have been enlarged (by cleaning probably) and very irregular in actual tip orifice in relation to their numbered sizes. Maybe i'll sit down with them and take some time with the guages and sort out what they actually are in modern notation of Smith or Victor or whatever so that I have a better idea of what they are.